


Chasing After the Same Things

by elle_stone



Category: Rent - Larson
Genre: Gen, Introspection, NYTW-verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-21
Updated: 2006-11-21
Packaged: 2017-11-06 05:16:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What he feels now, what he cannot explain, is an acute awareness of the dark plane of the rest of his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chasing After the Same Things

**Author's Note:**

> Written for challenge number 271, to write a fic in which the character being written about is never named, and which includes no dialogue, on the speed_rent community on livejournal. I kind of cheated on the second rule.

He gets up early on a gray, overcast day and doesn’t know what to do. About anything. This is not just boredom, ennui, the harsh drumming listlessness of a stretching Sunday afternoon. What he feels now, what he cannot explain, is an acute awareness of the dark plane of the rest of his life in front of him.

 

He pours cereal into a bowl, the clattering echo of it reverberating in the empty room, and takes his breakfast out onto the fire escape. It is no longer night, but not yet morning, and there will be no sun all day. He eats in silence and watches a few stray people pass by on the street below.

 

And what is he supposed to do now?

 

There was a time when she told him he could do anything, be anything. When she believed in him. And even now, she is not the only one to shake him by the shoulders every day and order him: pull yourself up. You’re better than this.

 

He is better than missed meals and dripping candle wax and heavy blankets draped over shoulders all winter, better than collection calls and broken windows and power outages. He has something in him that, though it glows faint yet, could still cause a great explosion, something big.

 

Outside, it is cold, the air infused with a deep chill. He rubs one hand up and down his arm. He isn’t wearing a jacket. He wishes he were somewhere else.

 

The memory comes to him without warning. He thinks of one night, one particular night, late May and the summer already started, and his fingers wrapped in the dirty sheets of another boy’s bed. The question: What did you wish for, when you were little?

 

The answer, his answer: to be an artist. For as long as he could remember, to be an artist. And as he grew older, to be with other artists. 

 

There had been sweat between his toes and in the space in the middle of his shoulder blades, and he had closed his eyes, and he had thought to ask: Is there anyone you would die for?

 

Yet he hadn’t been able to say the words, because he already knew the answer that would come. He knew, too, that the one he wanted to question was himself.

 

Now, he puts the empty bowl behind him on the windowsill, and crosses his arms, and leans forward on his knees. He has a lot of problems, and he feels the need, sudden and unprecedented as the memory before it, to list them.

 

He’s a thief, for one. Yes. A dirty thief, and he’s stealing from his own parents. It is a sad thing, he thinks, to realize, but he has never liked his parents, past the love that was necessary. As time moves on, that fades as well. Now they are only the people who hate what he does—who hate, therefore, who he is—and who have cut him off from their bank account, and who he takes money from anyway.

 

Two, he is a hypocrite. He curls his fingers into fists. He remembers.

 

It really was summer, he thinks. Too hot to call it spring. Too hot, that’s what he thinks, that’s what he can recall. He had to whisper all of his words. And what he whispered was that he loved, but he felt so hard that it hurt to love, and he buried his feelings so deep that no one saw that he loved. Again, he closed his eyes, and felt the space between them, and felt that space close, and felt the words, whispered so low that they were a feeling, light against his skin. 

 

All artists love.

 

What he didn’t see, and what he could not predict, was that a community can be destroyed just as it can be built. He shakes to think that they will die. His stomach turns and twists and his eyes start to close, without him meaning them to close, and he wonders if he will die too. What he leaves behind, on that day, will not be proof that he is an artist but proof that he is a fool.

 

Sometimes, it seems that everyone’s fears are written across their faces. That is what he would capture, if he knew how, if he could, though he knows they would wish their secrets kept. But he has never known how to keep a secret, and he has never kept any of his own. His own terror is below a thin surface, and it comes forward sometimes in his anger, his bitterness.

 

He looks up and the sky is the dark gray of early rainstorms, but it does not rain, and he knows it will not, not for a long time yet. If it did, he would be down on the street with his arms stretched wide and his eyes closed and his mouth open, and he would be breathing deep of the air of the city in the middle of an early autumn storm. When the puddles formed, he would splash through them. He would let the mud cover his shoes and streak the ratted edges of his pants, and if he were to fall, he would laugh.

 

But it doesn’t rain, though thunder claps in the far distance, and the people in the street start to run to the doorways. He wishes for a moment that he could drown the city out and start again.

 

The loft is empty, and he climbs back through the window and hears his shoes stomp hard down on the wooden floor.

 

He has never felt more alone in his whole life.

 

He wants to yell, to scream, to throw things and break things and destroy whatever he has left, but he cannot. He cannot purge his life any more than he can cry. So he falls to the floor and he pulls his legs up to his chest and he closes his eyes, and he wishes. 

 

He wishes with the fervent desire, hope, and conviction of childhood. 

 

He does not wish for death. He has never wanted death. He does not wish for anyone’s change of heart. He has spent so many hours in waiting, but he is tired of asking for selfish things. He does not wish for the end of poverty, or the end of disease. His scope, now, is small and the picture only the detail of a larger picture.

 

What he wishes is to go back to May. Instead of standing up, and saying he was sad but not that he was sorry, and keeping his eyes on his feet, he wishes he had stopped himself in time, turned around, stayed. Maybe nothing would be different, and maybe everything would, but neither possibility matters, not when all he can do is look back. 

 

He keeps his eyes closed so long, hopes so hard, that he does not hear the door open and the footsteps approach. When the hand presses against his shoulder and the fingers gently touch beneath his chin, it is too late, much too late, to hide the expression on his face.

**Author's Note:**

> And the character in question was...
> 
>  
> 
> Mark.


End file.
